Abstract
The purpose of this article is to introduce the theory of presentations of monoids acts. We aim to construct “nice” general presentations for various act constructions pertaining to subacts and Rees quotients. More precisely, given an M-act A and a subact B of A, on the one hand, we construct presentations for B and the Rees quotient A/B using a presentation for A, and on the other hand, we derive a presentation for A from presentations for B and A/B. We also construct a general presentation for the union of two subacts. From our general presentations, we deduce a number of finite presentability results. Finally, we consider the case where a subact B has a finite complement in an M-act A. We show that if M is a finitely generated monoid and B is finitely presented, then A is finitely presented. We also show that if M belongs to a wide class of monoids, including all finitely presented monoids, then the converse also holds.